RPG Playground 0.11: Talk to characters

Are you ready for a new release of RPG Playground? It’s right in time before Christmas! This release allows you to talk to characters, and edit their dialogue. I know a lot of you have been waiting for this, so go ahead and try it! The conversation is currently still limited to the NPC saying maximum 3 lines of text, but in the future this will be extended to full blown conversation trees.

Besides this awesome cool new feature, other improvements have been done:

Move characters and monsters by dragging them with the mouse.

Scrolling is now visually smooth. We run at 50 frames per second now instead of 30.

The last added NPC is selected by default

Fixed a weird visual issue with big levels.

Bug fixed that the hero is not able walk down again at the top of a tilemap.

YouTube help video is now always correctly positioned in fullscreen mode.

For the next release I will work on the server back-end. It’s currently slow, and doesn’t allow scaling to a huge amount of users. After that is finished, loading levels should be way faster than they currently are. And it will allow a huge amount of players simultaneously playing your game.

Here’s the explanation for the technical people: I’m currently storing all data in a MongoDB database. But hosting large amounts of data inside that database is pretty expensive. So I’m going to rework this setup so that MongoDB will only contain account and project info, and the real data files will be stored on file, served by a web server. Reading these files will then just be a request to the web server, which should be really fast.